88 COSMOPOLITAN SEPTEMBER 2017Instead, he asked for my number.
The accumulation of this attention
made me increasingly uncomfortable
and I started to desperately miss my
rather more-discreet wardrobe. I tore
the outfits off as soon as I reached
home in the evenings, and pulled
on the plainest pyjamas I could find.
Even positive comments from friends
(‘You should wear pink more often,
it really suits your skintone’) and
passive-aggressive compliments from
my mum (‘It’s about time you wore
more colours. You don’t look so dull
anymore’) failed to change my mood.
It felt woefully inappropriate.
The My Little Pony incident on the
eighth day was the icing on the cake.
Even though my colleague meant
no harm, and then tried to cheer me
up by saying my look was also ‘very
Ariana Grande’, he showed me what
everyone in the workplace must be
thinking, but was too afraid to say out
loud: I looked ridiculous.
I was ready to give up and have a
cheat day. But after just one more
day of work, it was the weekend
and I didn’t have to be my formal
office self any more. I could leave
the pink blazers, suits and dresses at
home and wear pink jeans, miniskirts
and T-shirts. I put on a more casual
outfit—a Levi’s tee with a metallic
skirt and trainers—and didn’t turn
away from my reflection in the mirror.
Bar the glaring colour, it looked like
something I would normally wear.Would politicians and voters take me
seriously when I looked like a frosted
strawberry cake?
I began to regret my decision as
soon as the clothes arrived. I tried
them on and barely recognised
myself. It took all of my willpower
the next day to put on a pink Zara
suit, and the only way I managed to
leave my hotel was by convincing
myself it was more Hillary Clinton
than Dame Edna.
I took a deep breath and walked
into the media room of Birmingham’s
ICC, where I was covering the
election count. I was a pink beacon
in a sea of blue and grey. To hide
the nerves, I smiled overly brightly
at anyone I walked past. It only
seemed to make my biggest fear—
that people would dismiss me as an
airhead—come true.
Wherever I went over the next
few days, I got the same look: a
slightly amused smile with a hint of
derision. Women—particularly those
in the stark monochrome I used
to sport—appeared at best slightly
amused by my get-up, and at worst,
subtly sneering. It could have been
just a figment of my self-conscious
imagination, but their expressions
seemed to say that I was a sweet,
simple girl that they need not
bother with.
Men were equally dismissive, but
also seemed to view my rosiness as
a sign of availability. When I popped
into a bar that first evening to
interview locals in Birmingham’s city
centre on election night, the very first
man I spoke to grabbed my arm and
then my bum. It was the first time
I’d been groped in nearly a decade,
but to my shock and disgust, it then
happened three more times by three
different men. I had been in the
bar for less than an hour, and been
groped four times!
I wondered if it was the pink,
the fact that I was a woman alone,
a simple case of bad luck, or a
combination of the above. But over
the 10 days of this experiment, I was
cat-called seven times, which is seventimes more than I’ve been cat-called
in the past three years.
I wasn’t wearing anything revealing,
and barely had any flesh on show. The
only difference to my normal life—
where I rarely receive unwanted
sexual attention—was the pink.
I could feel male eyes on me when
I walked into a public place, and I
was hit on several times during my
week in pink (again, far from normal
for me). On day six, more than
halfway through my experiment, a
man approached me on London’s
South Bank as I walked away from
interviewing Jo Cox’s sister a year
after the MP was killed. I thought
he was going to ask for directions.“Hello, IT?
Yeah,
when will
my pink
PC be
here?”“Oi, who
you
calling
My Little
Pony?”report